Imports of Venezuelan crude into the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port have totaled over 7 million barrels from January to November this year, almost three times the 2.5 million barrels in the same period of 2016, according to US Customs data.

The dramatic climb came despite the Trump administration’s threats to ban Venezuelan crude imports into the US and the shutdown of US Gulf Coast refineries due to hurricanes Harvey and Nate.

Despite the billions of dollars that have flowed into Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA in recent years, crude oil and refining output continues to languish. It is not lack of investment hindering growth but a more human flaw—corruption.

The deleterious effects of corruption have been recognized by oil minister Eulogio Del Pino and he has promised to squash it.

“The cancer of corruption has to be attacked all-out,” he said earlier in June at the headquarter offices of Intevep, a subsidiary of PDVSA.

The failure of Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA to live up to its contractually obligated investments in Curacao’s Isla refinery has come back to bite them and they now risk losing it to China, which has stepped up to the plate with its own plan.

PDVSA has operated the Di Korsou refinery, also known as Isla, and the Bullen Bay oil terminal since 1985 under a lease agreement due to expire at the end of 2019.

Venezuela’s thirst for light crude imports could play an interesting role in crimping as much as 300,000 b/d of its own crude exports. That would amount to a whopping 14% of Venezuela’s 2.12 million b/d production as of July.

The decline in employee benefits at Venezuela’s state owned PDVSA is the latest sign of the crisis being experienced by the country’s oil sector, which is under pressure from the drop in oil prices, declining output, industrial accidents, as well as by hyper- inflation suffered by the country.

Harvest Natural Resources is one of the last remaining US independent operators in the Venezuelan oil patch. But as Starr Spencer notes in this week’s Oilgram News column, At the Wellhead, Harvest has had a difficult time divorcing itself from an increasingly strained partnership with the country’s state oil company, PDVSA.

As various Caribbean refineries closed, reopening them faced a problem. Even if you could get cheaper WTI-based crude to them, they would be competing against US refineries powered by lower-cost natural gas. A refinery in the Caribbean would have little alternative except to use expensive fuel oil.

But industry sources are reporting that Atlantic Basin Refining, which is expected to be the new owners of the US Virgin Islands’ St.Croix refinery, known as Hovensa, is believed to have a business plan that will bring in cheaper sources of energy — specifically, LNG — to power the refinery.